Robert Parker - Mark Squires' wine Bulletin Board

[Roy Hersh]

After 9 years and well over 13,000 posts, mostly as "The Port Authority" answering questions on Port, Douro and Madeira for nearly a decade, here is the message when going to the usual URL:

vBulletin Message

Please note that the Bulletin Board will be closed until Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at approximately 6:00 p.m. EST in order to convert the forum to subscriber-only access. Please note the statement released by eRobertParker.com today:


----------------- Back in November, 2001, we launched eRobertParker.com with the goal of creating the world's best wine information site. Our objective was simple. We wanted to provide independent reviews of the best wines in the world and encourage open discussion of them to the benefit of the participants. Toward that end, we invited Mark Squires to bring his Wine Talk Bulletin Board over to the site and offered it openly and freely to all, subsidized by our subscription revenues. Virtually overnight the board became the Internet's premier forum for wine discussion. It has grown dramatically in size and stature as the population of wine lovers grew. At the outset, we asked Mark to maintain his philosophy of insisting on real names and email addresses. This approach sought civilized, non-commercial discussion of wine. Over the years the Internet and the board have changed. Supervising the huge volume of posts has become increasingly time consuming and expensive. At the same time, we've noted that the subscriber-only forums we created some time back are increasingly popular and much easier to manage. Moreover, we're committed to providing even more functionality and greater coverage of wines for our subscribers in the near future. This will require us to spend wisely. We are a small company with limited resources and, after months of deliberation, we've come to the conclusion that it is in the best interest of the people who count most - our subscribers - that we change our policy with regard to the bulletin board. On April 27, the entire Mark Squires' Bulletin Board on eRobertParker.com will become a subscriber-only forum, open only to subscribers of Robert Parker's Wine Advocate or eRobertParker.com. A notice to our print subscribers on how to continue/gain access to the subscriber-only board was sent with the April print edition. Once an eRobertParker.com subscriber is logged onto the site they can access the BB but they must logon to it in order to post. Change is always difficult but, like this action, often necessary. We are sorry to say goodbye to those posters to Mark Squires' Bulletin Board who are not subscribers, and who have made valuable contributions. We will miss you, but our overwhelming goal is more focused support and assistance to our subscribers, who are our bloodline of support and make all the fascinating features of the bulletin board possible. We look forward to better serving our loyal subscribers through a more focused effort on them. As always, we wish each and every one of you all the best in wine and life.

Very sad indeed. Archives locked and gone now. This is not too dissimilar when AOL shut things down back in 2002. All TNs were lost.

[Andy Velebil]

I'll only say what a bone-head move that was. I'll stop there least I get myself in trouble

[Derek T.]

I was not a member or subscriber so have little or nothing to lose.

This seems idiotic. It would cost the equivalent of nothing to have left these forums and TNs intact and available on the internet as a permanent archive. Closing the forum to non-subscribers is not the issue here. That is a decision for the owner of the site and he must follow whatever strategy makes most sense for him. But to effectively erase the contributions of the many thousands who must have contributed over the years is nonsense.

If anyone from eBob is reading this you should consider creating a static and freely available archive of the old site so that the world can continue to benefit from the conversations and tasting notes that were created there. In the long term all it will cost is a bit of webspace, of which you no doubt have unlimited access to.

[Peter W. Meek]

It's the way of the world. Remember the Yahoo takeover of GeoCities?

[Dylan Howard]

That does seem stupid, and it was a site I liked to read every few days (though they spent more time sniping at each other over age old disputes) than sharing their appreciation for wine (in my limited opinion)... Anybody suggest another decent wine forum?

thanks,

Dylan

[Peter W. Meek]

... Anybody suggest another decent wine forum?

FTLOP? A bit narrow in focus, but friendly and knowledgeable above all other wine forums I've seen.

[Peter W. Meek]

BTW, I quit the CellarTracker forum as being entirely too unpleasant, with sniping and junior-high-school-level bigotry (not because of hatred, simply because of difference) being the order of the day. IMHO, this is the result of a large forum with little or no Moderating.

The final straw was when someone made a post in a language other than English, and thirty or forty people jumped in making fun of some accidental similarities of words to English words. Not the sort of people I care to be associated with. CTF does not allow deletion of posts, but does allow editing. I went back and edited all (several hundred) of my posts to just say, good-bye; I don't care to be a part of this.

Perhaps that sort of thing was what happened to the RP/MS forums and closure/subscription was the only way to cure it. Dunno; wasn't ever there.

[Dylan Howard]

... Anybody suggest another decent wine forum?

FTLOP? A bit narrow in focus, but friendly and knowledgeable above all other wine forums I've seen.

I meant no disrespect to FTLOP. It is the friendliest forum I've come across in a while and is extremely informative, just meant something with a broader emphasis on wine.

dylan

[Peter W. Meek]

I was teasing. You're already here, after all.

[Roy Hersh]

Yes, although I post on a half dozen wine websites, the current best of the rest is: www.wineberserkers.com

There are some other general wine and non-niche specific forums that are decent: one is east coast centric, another only Americans, one is solely UK with a small smattering of othe EU folks and a handful of Yanks, the CTF which Peter mentioned, another that is for very serious geeks and those in the biz and then there is the one I mentioned above. That is where Andy and I post. I spent much more time on Parker's site but with that gone will do the Wine Berserkers instead. Dropping off some of the others is probably a smart thing for me as my time becomes increasingly limited.